Inbreeding

[vicijp]

Found this interesting article on the Racing Post.
http://www.racingpost.co.uk/news/master....story_id=844994
Ive always wondered why some breeders have this as their policy, all this article seems to do is dismiss it.
The little chestnut horse I sold had Green Dancer as his grand sire and dam sire, lovely horse but useless on the track.
Do any other disciplines do it? What do you think?

 

[Ariella]

Unfortunately you have to be registered and log in to read whatever you were putting the link to there...... pity cos I would have liked to have read it......

Theres a difference between 'in breeding' and line breeding....

With the Cleveland Bay horse being such a rare breed, and numbers being so small in Australia, it is reasonably hard to find horses that arent related to each other...

For instance..... in our own herd of horses we have a mare Ceilidh, who is by a horse called Killarnie, who was by Gillshaw Caliph...... Another mare is Killari - who was also by Gillshaw Caliph.....

Killari is not only one of our broodmares, but the dam of our 3/4 CB colt that we are going to have licenced to breed from as soon as he turns 2 in September.....

So when we put the colt (Bill) over Ceilidh, Gillshaw Caliph is the grandsire of both of them.... making him the great grandsire of he offspring on both sides.....

Gillshaw Caliph had some wonderful attributes and the double cross should be quite nice... particularly as Ceilidh is a stunning horse herself, as is Bill (ok so hes a typical youngster at the moment, but he is very nicely put together)...

Obviously we wont be putting Bill over Killari as thats his mother....and that would be inbreeding....

A computer program called SPARKS has been developed and the Cleveland Bay Horse Society in the UK and in Australia are making use of this.....

All the pure bred horses have been entered into it, and categorised...... they are given a letter reference and when pure bred mare owners want to breed to a purebred stallion, the program will tell them what crosses are reccomended and not too 'close'..... It also reccomends which crosses are going to be best to maintain genetic diversity within the breed.

This has been done as the pure bred numbers are quite low and it is still considered an Endangered Breed....

I think from memory SPARKS is also being used with Giraffes and one other extremely endangered animal in the zoos to try and get numbers up again without them all being 'inbred'. I believe that at this stage, the Cleveland Bay is the only equine 'family' on the SPARKS programme! So its all rather exciting!

 

[Clodagh]

I thought inbreeding was when it went wrong and line breeding when it worked!

 

[Ariella]

I left half a line out.....

There is a difference between 'inbreeding' and line breeding......

Its linebreeding when you do it, and its inbreeding when someone else does! lol

There is a point where it gets too close (like putting son over mother).... but there are exceptions to that rule.....

If you really want to cement the brilliant qualities or traits you can do it..... BUT.... you have got to be prepared to cull ruthlessly as it can also exagerate (sp?) bad qualities as much as good.....so you have to choose your initial horses VERY carefully..... and only leave the ones that work in the gene pool....and remove all the failures before they have a chance to pass along their problems.....gelding/speying or a lead injection.... harsh but hey, has to be done....

 

[lizstuguinness]

its done a lot for competition horses, but is generaly agreed that it should not be done until 3 generations. my mare has line breeding. her grt, grt, get sire and her grt grt grt dam (on her sires side, are by the same sire). her sire- harcos, has recently been de-listed from the knpw list due to quality of his offspring.
she does have a very slight twisted front leg, and does dish (tiny bit) when going very fast and is unbalanced on it, but its so unnoticable i didnt see it for 5 weeks after buying her! and the vet didnt notice either. maybe its a fault that someone tried to breed out. other than that shes so fantastic and is amazing quality. im interested is seeing if i can track down any more of harcos offspring and see if they have this trait too, perhaps thats why harcos was removed from breeding.

inbreeding is basicaly incest, line breeding is 2 generations removed, kind of 3rd cousin twice removed!!!

racing doesnt seem to have many morals along this ground so many are bred and disgarded, its a bit harsh really.

 

[severnmiles]

When I was with Marleen she line bred one and it was seriously stunning!! One of the nicest colts she had that year, in my opinion. So it can certainly work

 

[Parkranger]

That's interesting - in dog breeding it is considered a complete no no!

 

[severnmiles]

I know, the more distant in dogs the better, larger litters too.

The arabs used to do it. I think some people in horses frown upon it but from seeing Tanze I don't have much of a problem with it.